THe 2001 fiLe

A De­sign For (Space) Life

Stan­ley Kubrick’s fas­tid­i­ous­ness was leg­endary, so it’s no sur­prise that this book of 2001 con­cept art is equally ob­ses­sive. It fo­cuses on the archive of Harry Lange – the NASA de­sign­er­turned-Art Direc­tor who vi­su­alised the film’s hard­ware af­ter Kubrick’s in­tended col­lab­o­ra­tor, Ken Adam, bailed on what he saw as a half-formed and stress­ful project.

Lange’s de­signs are re­mark­ably be­liev­able. In­deed, at times this feels more like a tech­ni­cal man­ual than an art book, with page af­ter page of crisp black and white line draw­ings de­tail­ing chairs, dock­ing bays and land­ing pads. More ex­cit­ing are the al­ter­na­tive de­signs for the space sta­tion, var­i­ous craft and the mono­lith – of which we see nu­mer­ous an­gu­lar de­signs, but none as im­pla­ca­bly eerie as that sim­ple rec­tan­gle.

The cult of Kubrick will be in heaven here. And while ag­nos­tics may find the book a lit­tle dry in places, the art and Frayling’s text make for an en­gag­ing in­sight into the col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Lange, Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke – three ge­niuses pulling to­gether to cre­ate a mas­ter­piece. Will Salmon

The cult of Kubrick will be in heaven here

2001 wasn’t Lange’s only brush with SF: he also worked on The Em­pire Strikes Back and Re­turn Of The Jedi.